Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (11 page)

 

I don’t dig coal. I take the dirt off coal. You have to know how to handle dirt, to get the best advantage of your machinery. You just can’t take a piece of equipment that’s developed to take eighty foot of dirt and go on and get ninety, ninety-five. That’s
management,
you follow me? All you get over the maximum, that’s gravy. You have to uncover it as cheap as possible.

From the time you go to work, like eight o’clock in the morning, when you step up on that piece of equipment and get the seat, why there’s not a piece of equipment that’s not movin’ all day. We run around the clock. We’re on a continuous operation, three shifts a day, seven days a week. I work at least forty-eight hours every week.

You don’t ever stop it. Eighty dollars a minute down time is what they figure. You have an oiler that you break him in to operate. When I’m eatin’ lunch, thirty minutes lunch time, that machine’s still runnin’. The only time the machine stops is when you change shifts. Most machines have even got a time clock on how long it takes you to swing, how long it takes you to grease, how long it takes you to load your bucket and go to the bank, how long it takes you to dump it, how long this and that. I drink coffee and smoke and never miss a lay. There is no break. They don’t pay you for that.

I know what this piece of equipment’s raised to do. I always try to get that and to better it. Any company, if they’re worth 150 million dollars you don’t need to think for a minute they’re not gonna know what you’re doin’. They didn’t get there that way . . . and if I want to go any place . . . If I’m supposed to move five thousand cubic feet of dirt an hour, if that’s what the machine’s rated at, you know damn well they know it. Sure, you’re gonna get a certain amount of fatigue.

 

“There’s some dangers to it, yeah. There’s danger if you go out on the highway. If you get 125 deep. If you don’t get this hole tamped right and this kicks out, instead of goin’ vertical it goes horizontal
—
well hell, I’ve seen it go seventy-five foot high and the house covered up . . . people. It still isn’t as dangerous as underground. But around the tipples, even in strip mining, the dust is tremendous. These people have to wear inhalators to stay on the job. I do. They can be subjected to black lung.
”

 

We go as deep as ninety-five feet. From the operator’s standpoint it’s more profitable. From the consumer’s standpoint, they stand to benefit by the profit the company gets. The cheaper they produce the coal, the cheaper the electricity gets.

The company I work for produces five, six thousand ton of coal a day. A million ton a year. Our coal runs from four to seven foot thick. Four-foot coal runs six thousand tons to the acre. We’ll mine an acre a day. You have bastard veins, where the coal runs fifteen foot thick. They’re gettin’ ready to put in three and a half million ton a year mines.

People’s misinformed about this environmental thing. About your soil being dug up and not put back. Ninety percent of this ground, even twenty-five years ago, was rundown. Ninety percent of the ground I’ve seen tore up, you’d starve to death tryin’ to raise a roastin’ ear on it. But in the next ten years you’re gonna see good farm land that’ll be bought up by the coal companies. You’re gonna see some good topsoil move because the companies are gonna pay prices. They’re gonna get this coal.

There’s ground that doesn’t look too good now, but that’s all gonna be changed. The companies are makin’ the money to go and do this. They’re gonna level it. I can take you to a place right now where they’re throwin’ banks up eighty feet high. They have tractors up there running twenty-four hours a day and it’s leveler than my yard. That ground is in much better shape than it was before it was turned over.

Don’t misunderstand me. For years these things went on and the companies have been at fault. Hell, they’re just like you and me. They done got the gravy, and when they have to go puttin’ it back, it’s just a dead cost to them. But hell, they can afford to do it, so there’s no problem. They’re gonna do this. I’m no operator, I’m a workingman, but I don’t think it’s fair to the industry for this kind of talk to go on.

There’s a lot of things I don’t like about my work. I’ve never really appreciated seeing ground tore up. Especially if that ground could be made into something. I think about it all the time. You tear somethin’ up that you know has taken years and years and years . . . and you dig into rock. You get to talkin’ about the glacier went through there and what caused this particular rock to come out of the bank like it does. You see things come out of that bank that haven’t been moved for years. When you see ‘em, you have to think about ’em.

 

 

You go on a piece of equipment and say it’s worth ten million, fifteen million dollars. You don’t expect people to go out there and take care of that for thirty or forty dollars a day. If you got that kind of money to spend for equipment . . . it just doesn’t add up. I make more money than anybody at the mine. Still and all, they don’t have the responsibility I have. The difference is maybe eight, ten dollars a day between what I do and the men down there. All he has to do is get his bucket and go to work and come home. But if I don’t uncover the coal, nobody’s gonna work.

Aw no, I don’t feel tense. I’ve been around this stuff ever since I was a kid. I started working a coal mine when I was in high school back during the war. I started in the laboratory and then went to survey. These are company jobs. A miner is a UMW man. I don’t think there’s a union man that wants to see the ground torn up.

I don’t think anybody’s gonna say their work’s satisfyin’, gratifyin’, unless you’re in business for yourself. I don’t think you’re satisfied workin’ for the other person. But I make a good livin’ at it. I’ve been offered better jobs. But I’ve got a year and a half to go, I’ll have my pension time in. Then I’ll go company-wise. I entertain the idea of being an operator, put it that way.

He is a forty-eight-year-old construction worker who has been at it for twenty-two years. His wife works; his two married children live elsewhere. He is considerably overweight and his breathing is labored. “l’m a heavy equipment operator
.
I run a crane.
”

There is a pecking order: apprentices; “dirt work”
—
sewers, water mains, tunnels, roads; buildings; “soft jobs” for the older or disabled. “They’re supposed to be in the union at least ten years and fifty-five years old.”

 

There’s no job in construction which you could call an easy job. I mean, if you’re out there eating dust and dirt for eight, ten hours a day, even if you’re not doing anything, it’s work. Just
being
there is . . .

The difficulty is not in running a crane. Anyone can run it. But making it do what it is supposed to do, that’s the big thing. It only comes with experience. Some people learn it quicker and there’s some people can never learn it. (Laughs.) What we do you can never learn out of a book. You could never learn to run a hoist or a tower crane by reading. It’s experience and common sense.

There’s a bit more skill to building work. This is a boom crane. It goes anywhere from 8o feet to 240 feet. You’re setting iron. Maybe you’re picking fifty, sixty ton and maybe you have ironworkers up there 100, 110 feet. You have to be real careful that you don’t bump one of these persons, where they would be apt to fall off.

At the same time, they’re putting bolts in holes. If they wanted a half-inch, you have to be able to give them a half-inch. I mean, not an inch, not two inches. Those holes must line up exactly or they won’t make their iron. And when you swing, you have to swing real smooth. You can’t have your iron swinging back and forth, oscillating. If you do this, they’ll refuse to work with you, because their life is at stake.

They’re working on beams, anywhere from maybe a foot wide to maybe five or six inches. These fellas walk across there. They have to trust you. If there’s no trust there, they will not work with you. It has to be precision. There has been fellows that have been knocked off and hurt very seriously. If there’s someone careless or drinking . . . I had a serious accident myself. My one leg is where I don’t trust to run a crane any more with 239, 240 feet of stake.

These cranes are getting bigger and bigger, so there’s more tension. Now they’re coming out with a hydraulic crane. Cherry pickers they’re called. They’re so very easy to upset if you don’t know exactly what you’re supposed to do. And it happens so quick.

They’re more dangerous if you don’t respect ’em. Everything inside your cab has got a capacity, tells you what it can lift, at what degree your boom is. But there’s some of these foremen that are trying to make a name for themselves. They say, We’re only gonna pick this much and that much and there’s no use we should put this down. A lot of times they want you to carry things that weighs three or four ton. On level ground this can be done, but if you’re going down a slope, you’re asking for trouble.

It’s not so much the physical, it’s the mental. When you’re working on a tunnel and you’re down in a hole two hundred feet, you use hand signals. You can’t see there. You have to have someone else that’s your eyes. There has been men dropped and such because some fellow gave the wrong signal.

Then there’s sometimes these tunnels, they cave in. There’s been just recently over here in Midlothian, it was four fellas killed. They encountered some gas in there. Sometimes you get a breakthrough in water. There was one of ‘em here in Calumet City about a year ago. It was muck. This thing caved in their mushing machine. A big percentage of ’em, the accidents, come from a habit. You’re just not thinkin’ about your work, becomes second nature. Maybe you’re thinkin’ about somethin’ else, and right there in that instant something happens.

The average age of the workingman, regular, is seventy-two. The average crane operator lives to be fifty-five years old. They don’t live the best sort of life. There’s a lot of tension. We’ve had an awful lot of people have had heart attacks. Yeah, my buddy.

There was eleven of them in an elevator downtown. They built Marina Towers. The company that built that elevator, it was supposed to be foolproof. If it got going so fast, it would automatically stop—which it didn’t. It fell twelve floors and they were all hurt bad. Two of them had heart attacks when this was falling. There was one fella there that was completely paralyzed. He had eleven children. The only thing he could move is his eyes, that’s all. It’s because somebody made a mistake. A lot of stuff that comes out of the factory isn’t exactly right. It’s faulty. They don’t know until it’s used on a job. It’s not just one person that’s hurt. It’s usually four or five.

Before I had this heart attack, I sure wanted a drink. (Laughs.) Sure, it relaxes. You’re tense and most everybody’d stop and have a beer or a shot. They’d have a few drinks and then they’d go home. They have a clique, like everybody has. Your ironworkers, they go to one tavern. Maybe the operators go to another one. The carpenters go to another place. They build buildings and tear ’em down in the tavern. (Laughs.)

There’s a lot of times you have to take another man’s word for something and a lot of people get hurt. I was hurt because I took another man’s word. I was putting the crane on a lowboy—the tractor that hauls it. This foreman told me to swing this stub section of the boom from the front of the lowboy to the back. I said it couldn’t be done. He said it’s been done a number of times. The lowboy wasn’t big enough for the crane and the crane went over backward. They had some extra weight on the back of the crane, which is an unsafe practice. When the crane went over backwards and threw me out, a five-hundred-pound weight went across my leg and crushed my ankle and hip. I was in the hospital, had three operations on my leg and was out of work eighteen months.